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An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…

Bill Bryson

If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.
BILL BRYSON

Fate Jobs Lonely
And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.
BILL BRYSON

Essentially Good Orphan Player Story Successful
Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.
BILL BRYSON

Around Average Shopping Supermarket Walking
That is jargon – the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement – and it is one of the great curses of modern English.
BILL BRYSON

Cruise English Implement Modern Restructuring
My first rule of travel is never to go to a place that sounds like a medical condition and Critz is clearly an incurable disease involving flaking skin.
BILL BRYSON

Judging Skins Travel
Physicists are atoms’ way of thinking about atoms.
BILL BRYSON

Atom Thinking Way
The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
BILL BRYSON

Enormous Realize Scale Secret Way
The English invented cricket to make other human endeavors look interesting.
BILL BRYSON

Cricket Interesting Looks
The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.
BILL BRYSON

Beer Coffee Travel
Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
BILL BRYSON

Better Feel Leaving Mind
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.
BILL BRYSON

Ideas Notebook Records
It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players – more if they are moderately restless.
BILL BRYSON

Burn Calories Moderately Shares Spectator
Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.
BILL BRYSON

Dancing Tunes Watches
It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual.
BILL BRYSON

Autumn Fields Green Muskiness Sight Sumptuous
But here’s an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.
BILL BRYSON

Chosen Far Providence Whatever Wish
The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it.
BILL BRYSON

Accept Country Lesson Nothing Same Thing

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…

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An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…

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Popular Authors

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